


Lost in the Echo Part I

by flamethrower



Series: Re-Entry: Journey of the Whills [41]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, F/M, GFY, M/M, clone feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-10
Updated: 2015-05-10
Packaged: 2018-03-29 20:06:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3908923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flamethrower/pseuds/flamethrower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"What are friends for?"</p><p>"Blowing things up, apparently."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost in the Echo Part I

**Author's Note:**

> Soooo everything has been insane and I am STILL NOT DONE with the spring semester, though I'm a lot closer. Enough that I was rested enough to get this chapter done.
> 
> I have 222 messages in my Inbox to respond to, not including stuff on Tumblr. If you've left commentary and didn't get a response, you are not being ignored and have not been forgotten. The rumbling guilt pangs will not allow it. I'll answer everything soon-ish. <3

Lothal was a pit. This was not a new development, but Talon Karrde was still shocked by the utter devastation of the port city. He knew it had been hit hard by Tarkin during the infamous Lothal Rebellion, but usually, the Empire at least pretended to give a damn about its citizens.

“Did they seriously name this place Capital City?”

Talon glanced at Tapper, who was trying to keep his distaste for the city off of his face and failing badly. “I like it.”

“You would.” Tapper took Carniss’s hand as the security chief joined them. Tapper and Carniss loathed the sight of each other, but they could play married couple to the hilt. “How’s the accommodations look, darling?”

“Like a dungheap set afire, dear,” Carniss replied, her eyes flickering about as she took in the rubble of ruined buildings and the litter on the street. The homeless population per capita was on par with Nar Shaddaa. “I really don’t think this is a wise place to settle.”

Karrde hid a grimace. Not the news he was hoping for. “You two go on ahead. I’m going to find a bar.”

“Don’t drink the water,” Tapper suggested, just before Carniss tugged him off to the east, ostensibly in the direction of the hotels outside of the spaceport. He wondered if there was anything left—not that they intended to stay.

Talon shoved his hands into his coat pockets and ambled along with a lot more ease than he was feeling. There was a constant prickling between his shoulder blades that told him he was being watched, but most of the denizens on the street were ignoring his existence. He knew Lothal didn’t get a lot of space traffic; Talon was making the first run into the sector of space since Tarkin all but shut down the entire region trying to capture a single group of rebels. Their arrival should have stirred interest, and yet…

There was more than one set of eyes following his steps. He was starting to suspect that Carniss spoke too soon.

He stopped to look at a fading wanted poster slapped onto the side of the building. The adhesive had lasted longer than the plast and ink, but he could still discern the washed-out images of a human male and a Twi’lek female. Most of the description and list of criminal acts had vanished with time, but “aiding, abetting, and committing criminal acts” stood out, as did “suspected Jedi.”

He peered closer. Someone had taken a pen and refreshed the ink on “Jedi.”

Talon moved on, thoughtful. He’d heard that most (if not all) of the original Lothal crew survived—or at least they were still alive ten years ago. He didn’t know anything of their fate beyond the blockade going up. There was too much going on, too many ongoing rebellions within Imperial space. With the Emperor dead, the Alliance was growing by leaps and bounds.

There were whispers that the Alliance wanted to call itself the New Republic. Talon thought that was a stupid damned idea, naming a potential new government after the ghost of the old. He’d been around long enough to remember that there was a _reason_ that great pile of corruption became an Empire.

“Aves,” he said, when a blond man fell into step beside him.

“Hi, honey,” Aves replied, grinning. “Miss me?”

“Like a surgically removed, malignant growth. Any luck?”

“Suppose that depends on what you’d consider lucky.” Aves waited until a Rodian passed by, glaring at them in undisguised suspicion. “Why the hell are we here, Boss? These people don’t have money, they have dust and rags.”

“You think the rumors are just that, I take it?” Talon asked.

Aves frowned. “Maybe. I managed to overhear enough to know that our best bet is a cantina, northern market district.”

“Lead the way,” Talon said. The scenery did not get any less depressing, or any cleaner, as they walked. The market district was a laughable state of affairs. Most of the stalls were empty and abandoned, and what was for sale was of dubious quality, at best.

It was enough to make him hope that the rumors of a renewed Rebellion on Lothal were true. Sentients deserved better than this.

If there was an element of self-serving in that desire…well, he was a businessman, and his employees needed to eat, too. People who were waging rebellions needed supplies, and Karrde was in the business of getting them.

The cantina advertised itself as Ake’s Tavern, and was in better shape than most of the surrounding buildings. Business must have been steady enough. The destitute liked to drink as much as anyone else.

Inside, it was dark and quiet, but clean. It was early afternoon, so there were few customers. An Ithorian was wiping down the wooden bar top with a stained towel, using his species’ excellent peripheral vision to study the newcomers.

“Man, I hope we find something here that makes it worth skipping through the blockade,” Aves muttered.

Talon snorted in derision. “That was one of the most pathetic blockades in recent memory. They didn’t even attempt to follow us.”

“Maybe they think they’ll hit us on the way out,” Aves said.

“Or maybe the Empire has other things to worry about.”

“Right. I’ll fetch drinks,” Aves said, perking up. “Usual?”

“Surprise me.” _You know something we don’t know,_ Talon thought of the Ithorian barkeep, but deliberately turned his gaze away. He dismissed the two obvious farmers; if they were rebelling, they were doing it by yelling about grain prices. The drunkard was also out of the question, as he was snoring and leaking out of two different orifices besides.

Oh, hello there. There was a humanoid shape in one of the rear booths, mostly hidden by the cantina’s deep shadows. Talon felt a trickle of unease travel down his spine as his instincts perked up and took notice.

_Lothal has a spy network, and that’s who my watchers were reporting to._

Aves approached, a glass in each hand, and followed Talon’s gaze. “You made a new friend already?” Their watcher was human, given the five-fingered and pale-skinned hand that set down a half-empty glass.

The sensation of being weighed and measured was a bit unnerving. Car’das had once had that effect on people, but he was five years gone, vanished gods alone knew where.

“Not yet,” Talon said, and strode to the booth after taking one of the drinks. “May we join you?”

The human lifted the glass again. “There is room enough.”

“That’s not exactly a ‘yes,’” Talon countered, curious. The human was most likely a man, and had a soft voice with an accent that was possibly original Coruscanti. With the spread of the Empire, you could find proper Core accents in very strange places. He wasn’t going to put money on his identification until he saw the man’s face, though.

“But it gave you the option to change your mind,” the man countered.

Talon smiled. This was going to be fun. Then he took a sip of what Aves had brought him and directed a glare at his companion. The liquor was far too green, and far too damned sweet.

Aves shrugged. “It was one of the only things not watered down.”

“Fortunately for you both, it’s only toxic to Bith.” The man was smiling beneath the hood of that cloak; Karrde was certain of it.

“No Bith genes here, not unless granny was lying.” Aves raised his glass, revealing more of the green liquor. “What were you drinking to, friend?”

“The renewed joy of waking up to yet another day where the Emperor is still very, very dead.”

“Well, that’s pretty damn specific,” Aves said, “but I like it.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Talon said. Dead Emperors were good for business. The Empire was just desperate enough that the old hardline stance against smugglers got more flexible by the day.

Their shadowy friend’s drink vanished all at once. Overconfident, veteran, or maudlin—Talon wasn’t yet certain which it would be. Talon himself was going to be hard-pressed to finish the teeth-burning sweetness Aves was now completely responsible for.

“Sorry,” Aves said, looking not sorry at all. “Forgot your sweet tooth curdled up and died around about birth.”

“What brings you to Lothal?” the cloaked man asked, after placing his empty glass upside down on the table. “It’s not exactly open to visitors.”

“Business,” Talon replied evenly. “Perhaps even the sort that will get regular traffic back onto Lothal’s soil.”

“I think the locals would appreciate that. They would not be the only ones.”

“Huh.” Aves put his elbow up on the table, swirling the green liquid around in his glass. “And how long have you been stuck here?” he asked, to Talon’s surprise. Aves’s perceptiveness was part of the reason Karrde was grooming him for leadership, but that was a hell of a guess.

“A fucking year,” their host said in evident frustration. “Tatooine would have been less isolating than this.”

“You know things are in a sorry state when Tatooine becomes preferable,” Aves said, as Talon looked at him from the corner of his eye. Aves tapped his finger against the rim of his glass twice, confirming Talon’s assessment: They had found their first contact.

“Perhaps I should introduce myself,” Talon began. “I’m—”

The man’s laughter cut him off. “I know who you are, Karrde,” he said, “and you’re one of the last people I ever expected to find on Lothal.”

Karrde smiled when the man drew back his hood. He had long hair streaked red and blond, and he either needed a shave or to let the damned beard grow in, but the features were unmistakable. “Well, well. Ben of Tatooine, he who Does Not Work For Jabba. It’s been a long time since Selonia.”

“Thirteen years ago, wasn’t it?” Ben asked. Karrde had a brief, disturbing moment when he thought that the man honestly wasn’t sure, and had no idea why that concept bothered him. Losing track of time was almost a human standard.

“It was,” Talon said. Ben looked a hell of a lot less rough than the man he’d met on Selonia, but otherwise he didn’t seem to have aged at all. His eyes were the only marked difference, but that wouldn’t keep Karrde from recognizing him. He never forgot talent.

“Injury?” Talon asked solicitously, pointing at his own eyes.

“Poison,” Ben replied. “No visual damage, though.”

“What the hell kind of poison bleaches your eyes?” Aves wanted to know. He kept throwing glances at Karrde, trying to gain information about their contact without asking prying questions. Talon tapped on his glass with his little finger. Later.

“Nothing kind,” Ben said, and stood up. “Whatever you’re wishing to discuss, it shouldn’t happen here. The bartender is decent, but Imperial patrols still stop by every hour.”

“Every hour? That is some serious overkill,” Aves said as he and Talon followed Ben.

“Tarkin never did like being thwarted,” Ben said, and waved at the Ithorian on their way out. He directed them into an alleyway a few blocks from the cantina; a minute later, a full squad of stormtroopers wandered past.

Ben led them outside what was left of the port and took them to an abandoned observation tower. It was well-lit and clean inside, though there were stacked crates off to one side, marked with a decent attempt at labeling.

“Stormtrooper helmets? Who the hell collects Imp buckets?” Aves asked, after opening the lid and finding himself confronted with half a dozen differing Imperial helmets.

“Whoever used to live here,” Ben said, tossing his cloak over the back of a chair. “This place was claimed by one of the original Lothal rebels. The rumor mill is still insistent that he’s alive, so I thought perhaps he might like his things back if the blockade ever fell.”

“You mean, if he wouldn’t get shot on sight for daring to show his face anywhere in the system,” Talon said. Ben nodded, lifting his hand and running his fingertips along a panel in the ceiling.

Talon grimaced when the jammer took effect, making his ears whine and his teeth ache until the initial burst quieted. “Paranoid?”

“Well, when they really are out to get you…” Ben walked to a filtration setup, a slow drip that was turning Lothal’s polluted groundwater into something drinkable.

Aves glanced at him while Ben’s back was turned. _Man moves like a fighter_ , he signed.

Talon nodded. He’d noticed that years before, but it seemed a hell of a lot more pronounced now. “What brings you to Lothal, Ben?”

“A complete fucking accident,” Ben said, while popping out a blackened filter on the filtration unit. He pulled out a new filter from his belt and shoved it into place. “I’m not supposed to be anywhere near here, but I happen to know a lot of people with too much power and no sense whatsoever. Your turn. What sort of business brings you to Lothal, Karrde?”

Talon sat down on one of the crates, after making sure it would hold his weight. “There are rumors that the Lothal Rebellion has begun again. People running rebellions need supplies. I have always been willing to provide decent service.”

“For a fee, of course.” Ben seemed amused, but it didn’t match the quick flash of emotion in his color-bleached eyes.

“A fair one,” Talon countered. Ben was extremely bitter about something, but he couldn’t figure out if it was aimed in any specific direction. He guessed that the man was a well-preserved forty Standard; plenty of time to accumulate bitter feelings about all sorts of things.

“Then I’m sorry to tell you that the rumors in this instance are not quite correct,” Ben said, smiling. “It’s just me, Karrde.”

Talon raised an eyebrow. “And what are you doing that the Empire believes that it might be looking at a renewed rebellion?”

“Killing stormtroopers,” Ben answered. He sat down with a chipped mug in his hands, looking contemplative. “A lot of stormtroopers.”

“Any particular reason?” Aves asked. “Not that I have a lot of objections to dead Imps.”

“I don’t like their bad habit of believing they have free reign to torment whoever catches their fancy.”

“That’ll get you a lot of attention from the Empire, if you keep that up,” Talon pointed out. He suspected it already had.

Ben shrugged. “They’ll run out of stormtroopers eventually. Sorry about the lack of hospitality, by the way. I only get a cup of liquid out of this thing about every four hours.”

“Trust me, I can go without drinking Lothal’s water,” Aves said, giving the filtration rig a suspicious look. “I don’t need for my piss to glow in the dark.”

“It doesn’t actually glow,” Ben said in a mild voice. “It merely fluoresces.”

Aves snorted. “Oh, I like you already. Can we keep him, Boss?”

“If Jabba couldn’t manage to latch on, I doubt he’ll be interested,” Talon said. Without a true Lothal rebellion to fund, Talon didn’t have much use left for the planet. “But, the offer’s still open, Ben. Want a job? My business and my reputation have come a long way since we last spoke.” Ben had an easy presence to him, but Talon suspected that his geniality turned to ice and fire if the shit started to fly. He’d wanted to hire the man in the worst damned way before; now it was like an itch, but he didn’t think that Ben was going to bite.

As if on cue, Ben’s gaze settled like a leaden weight. Talon resisted the urge to flinch, squirm, or otherwise betray his discomfort. That sense of being weighed and measured was far more intense than it had been in the bar. Dammit, he didn’t need another Car’das, but he wasn’t going to take back the offer.

“You work both sides of the border, right?” Ben asked.

Talon nodded. “It’s profitable, and I try to keep things fair.”

“Fair.” Ben seemed to consider that. “I don’t need a job. In fact, I’d like to hire you.”

Aves lifted his head in surprise. “You don’t look to be swimming in funds,” he said, nodding at Ben’s clothes. The man’s boots were still in decent condition, but he could really use some new clothes that fit and weren’t threadbare.

“I have money, I just can’t get to it here,” Ben said, setting his mug aside. “If I tried to tap in to that account on an Imperial world, it would set off too many alarms.”

“Neutral bank, not Imperial aligned,” Talon surmised. It was not technically illegal to have accounts with one of the non-government banks, but the Empire had long since made it a crime to _access_ those accounts within Imperial space.

“How’s Teaks?” Ben asked, a rapid change of subject that Talon suspected was an attempt at breathing room—or space for an internal debate.

Aves grimaced. “Lost him a few months back. We were supposed to be doing a Hutt drop, but word had literally just hit the feeds that Jabba was dead. We walked right into a damned Hutt syndicate war.”

“It’s led to some of us being able to carve back some of what Jabba had taken, but the business gained wasn’t worth losing Teaks,” Talon said. “I damn near lost Aves, too, when the rear aft section of my ship was blown out. The _Wild Karrde_ spent a month in dry-dock, and Aves spent a week in bacta.”

Ben seemed sympathetic. “I’m sorry to hear that. I’m glad that it wasn’t worse.”

“So am I.” Talon waited a moment, and then went back to the point. “What’s the job?”

“Three part deal,” Ben said, setting down the mug. “In or out?”

Talon glanced at Aves, who lifted one shoulder. _What could it hurt?_

“In,” Talon said. “With the means to terminate the agreement if I think you’re going to get us killed.”

Ben’s smile chased a hell of a lot of ghosts from his eyes. “For starters, I’ll pay you twenty thousand to get me the hell off of this rock and to a location I can access those funds.”

“Payment when you can actually access the funds, right?” Aves asked dryly.

“Well, that is the difficulty, hence the larger payout,” Ben replied. “After I confirm what’s left in the account, I want you to help me turn Lothal into a planet that _could_ rebel, instead of a planet too beaten to even contemplate it.”

“You want us to smuggle the means to _start_ a rebellion.” Talon ran his fingers along his moustache, contemplating the idea. “That’s a blockade run in and out, every trip, plus offloading time, plus whatever cargo you’re thinking of.”

“First stage would be medicine, food, and non-military supplies,” Ben said. “These people haven’t been given basics for years. The whole damn population needs the broad-spectrum inoculations, or half the planet’s going to die the moment the blockade goes down.”

“Working in stages, then,” Aves said, and Talon glanced at him. “What? Just because we didn’t go Alliance doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention to how they did things.”

“Second stage doesn’t begin until the Lothal are confident enough in their health and their chances to be willing to give it a go,” Ben said. “That means military supplies and surplus, as well as a continuation of the supplies from stage one.”

“ _Will_ they give it a go?” Aves asked. “Rebelling, I mean.”

“The original rebellion was small,” Ben said in a low voice. “Ten years of oppression and foul treatment later, and I think the Lothal would tear everything Imperial apart with their bare hands if they had the strength left to do so. No, rebellion won’t be a problem. I just want to keep the casualties to a minimum.”

“What’s the third stage?” Karrde asked, but he suspected he knew.

“Space-faring vessels actually capable of taking out Star Destroyers.” Ben tilted his head. “Or a significantly-sized navy. One of the two.”

“Private groups, maybe,” Talon mused. There were certainly contacts enough, but more than half of them would turn right around and attack their employer once the terms of the contract were met. “The good groups tend to be expensive.”

“If you push the Lothal Rebellion far enough, you might get the Alliance willing to involve their military,” Aves pointed out.

“Maybe, but I’m not counting on that.” Ben shook his head. “Let’s just worry about stage one and two for now.”

“For stage one and two, you’ve got a deal,” Talon said, holding out his hand. Ben rose and shook it; Talon had a swift impression of fighter’s calluses and contained energy, and then the feeling passed as Ben released his hand. “When would you like to go retrieve our pay?”

“Whenever you’re ready to leave, I’m available,” Ben said, and if he sounded eager, Talon damned well couldn’t blame him.

“Our business here has just concluded,” Talon said. “We just have to retrieve my people from the capital.”

Ben nodded and grabbed a jacket that was almost in worse shape than his shirt. Talon let his eyes rest on the abandoned cloak, but chose not to comment as Ben made an adjustment to the filtration setup that sent the trickle of water into a larger reservoir.

“You don’t have parasites, do you?” Aves asked, as they regrouped at the bottom of the tower.

Ben gave him a sour look. “Just for that remark, your ship owes me a hot shower.”

“At twenty thousand credits paid for simple conveyance, you can have as many hot showers as you wish,” Talon said. It always proved wise to take care of your customers, and he suspected Ben’s contract was going to be a lucrative one.

 

*          *          *          *

 

Obi-Wan Kenobi’s first month on Lothal was mostly a blank. He remembered a fist heading towards his face; he remembered Black’s frantic apology when he woke up in the family basement with a migraine that felt like a destroyer parked on his skull. He remembered being introduced to Grey, and the siblings joking about their sister named Silver.

Their family name was Greene. Headache or not, Obi-Wan had found that damned amusing.

The siblings more or less took his sudden appearance in stride, except for the part where he’d apparently fallen out of the fucking _sky_. Black had panicked and punched him in the face.

The Greenes kept him safe from Imperial patrols until he’d regained enough of his senses to realize that there were, indeed, _fucking Imperial patrols_ marching about.

That was his first major clue as to what Emmaltine had done. Obi-Wan confirmed it when he could actually sit down and focus on the newsfeeds for more than two seconds at a time, somewhere around month six. He was on Lothal (gathered that, thanks) in the middle of the sector-wide blockade that Grand Moff Tarkin had erected during the infamous Lothal Rebellion.

Luke and Leia had been fifteen at the time. Leia’s first foray into Coruscant politics during her bid to be elected Alderaan’s Senator had been to criticize Tarkin’s handling of the Lothal crisis. It had been a good speech—he’d heard it via relays a few days afterwards—but it hadn’t convinced the military to remove the blockade.

If the newsfeeds hadn’t confirmed it, his second clue would have been the pervasive, non-stop headache. He thought at first it had been evidence of mental injury, one that he wasn’t yet capable of dealing with.

Then he had awoken one night in full darkness. Somewhere out in the galaxy, Darkness had just nova-burst and then vanished.

That was the second time he’d felt that particular death.

By afternoon the next day, the feeds were buzzing with news of an Imperial/Alliance battle near Endor. The Imperials were denying the battle, a battle station’s destruction—and the deaths of the Emperor and Darth Vader.

His headache had ended not long afterwards. He’d spent a full year in two places at once. Fucking hells, his life was a disaster.

Qui-Gon had once sat him down and explained to Obi-Wan what it had felt like, to unexpectedly lose two lifelong pairbonds when Tahl and Micah had been killed during Obi-Wan’s apprenticeship. Obi-Wan had seen the evidence of that anguish, that mental damage, with his own eyes, and had to go for a swim in a fucking river (and almost drown) to keep Qui-Gon from utterly self-destructing from the damage.

The Daughter, Emmaltine, in her complete idiocy, had not given any thought to what would happen to the bonds of someone ejected from one timeline and shoved inelegantly into another. It had not just been one bond he had lost, not two, but _five:_ three training bonds with Anakin, Rillian, and Jeila; one old training bond with Master Yoda; and one strong pairbond with Garen Muln. The Lifebond hadn’t broken, but even it was damaged, showing glowing spots where it looked as if the threads that wove it had started to fray. He thought maybe his bond with Anakin hadn’t broken right away, but he couldn’t remember clearly enough to be certain.

Most of the first half of his year on Lothal was piecemeal because he’d been largely out of his damned mind.

Lothal had been effectively cut off from the galaxy for ten years, and it showed. The farms did all right, but there was no one to trade with but each other. Money was scarce, all other jobs were pretty much nonexistent, everyone was poor, and disease was prevalent. The damned Imperials had continued Tarkin’s policies even after his death, refusing to provide relevant medical assistance, vaccinations, and supplies. Not even smugglers dared the blockade, not when there weren’t any paying customers on the other side.

Anger at the plight of the Lothal had stirred his blood, and possibly his reactions to the Empire’s presence had been a bit more…violent…than it might otherwise have been. He didn’t handle the idiots like a Sith, at least, but he hadn’t quite acted as a Jedi, either.

Balance again. Obi-Wan didn’t think that was the sort of balance anyone had in mind—least of all the Empire, who hadn’t appreciated the sudden, Lothal-based decimation of their ranks.

He had no idea where Anakin was.

Obi-Wan knew his Padawan was alive, and that he was somewhere out in the galaxy, but space was vast. Without the link of the training bond—and more importantly, without _transport—_ he did not yet have a way to even begin hunting Anakin down.

When he wasn’t worried about Anakin, he poked and prodded at the healing Lifebond. He could never gain any sense of response from the other end. He screamed down those iridescent threads and heard nothing. Still there. Still alive. Still connected.

Utterly unreachable.

It was actually not much of a decision to make, once he was in full control of his faculties. Lothal had a problem. He had the means to help them solve it.

Step one had been to attract enough attention that someone from the Alliance might brave the blockade and remember that Lothal had dared to be among the first to publicly stand up and fight back against the Empire. Within a month of the Emperor’s death, rumors were flying that Lothal was in the midst of a full-scale rebellion.

He hadn’t expected the smugglers to show up first. He also hadn’t expected the smuggler to be Talon Karrde.

Damn, did the Force like its little jokes.

It was also a terrible jolt when Karrde took him to Naboo.

“I was expecting a neutral world. Last I checked, Naboo was Imperial-aligned,” Obi-Wan said.

Karrde was leaning against the bridge command chair as the ship settled into a docking bay. “I know my history, Ben. The Naboo never did take well to oppression.”

 _No, they did not,_ Obi-Wan thought. “That was a long time ago.”

“The boss has had contacts here for years. If you want to get a line on your credit accounts without getting Imperial attention, this is one of the safest places that we know of,” Aves said, turning away from the co-pilot’s station. “Also, they have one of the best brothels in eight sectors.”

Obi-Wan turned down the invitation to the brothel and told Aves not to come back with parasites. He departed to the music of Aves stuttering indignantly, while Tapper laughed and Carniss tried to pretend she’d heard nothing.

Karrde’s slicer protégé cornered him before he could escape the ship, and pressed a data chip into his hand. “Stick this in first and nobody will ever know you were here,” the young man said, his eyes glinting with absolute glee. “It’s my best work to date.”

“Shouldn’t you save your best work for emergencies?” Obi-Wan asked, pocketing the chip. “What if someone cracks your code?”

“Duh,” Ghent retorted. “All codes get cracked eventually. If they break it, I get to figure out how they did it, and then make the next one even better.”

Naboo was both a relief and heartache. He could tell from watching Theed’s populace that the Empire’s hammer had not come down nearly as harsh on Naboo. Their wardrobe wasn’t as posh, and the city didn’t gleam as it once had, but at least no one was starving in the streets.

He logged into a public terminal with Ghent’s data chip installed, and went hunting. His own personal account was still active and earning interest. He’d had at least eighteen thousand credits in it before he’d gone off and died on the fucking Death Star—more than enough to pay a sarcastic, suspicious Corellian. Now it was sitting at just under twenty-five thousand credits. If need be, he could clothe and feed himself and Anakin for at least a decade.

Not that he could find Anakin.

Not that he wanted to be trapped here for the next decade.

Obi-Wan rested his head in his hands. He wanted a drink, he wanted his spouse, and he wanted all of those cherished mental connections back. He wanted to go _home_ , and home was not _here_.

He forced himself to move on, to plug into the accounts he’d managed to claim from the Order’s finances before the Empire had locked it all down. Personal accounts he’d left alone, but three of the Jedi Order’s emergency accounts were his to claim. The money had originally been set aside for times of hardship.

Obi-Wan’s mouth settled into a grim line. Well, times were fucking hard.

He’d also reclaimed fifteen of the diplomatic credit accounts, and at least four maintenance and upkeep stipends for the Temple. Twenty-one accounts. Fifty-six million credits when he’d gathered it all; two hundred eighty-three million and change after twenty-five years of interest.

Obi-Wan stared at the numbers, running calculations through his head. He’d refamiliarized himself with current costs of goods. Hammering out the right sort of deal with Karrde was going to be a delight. The smuggler was decent, but Obi-Wan refused to sacrifice the entirety of the remains of the Order’s financial solvency for one single cause. Some of that money was eventually going to go to the right place, the right person…or perhaps the right people. The Lothal claimed that two of their original rebels had been Jedi, and no one had actually received confirmed word of their deaths.

Obi-Wan hadn’t recognized either of the names. He wondered who they had been.

He rolled up his sleeves to hide their threadbare nature before going into any of Naboo’s shops. He looked destitute enough; he didn’t need to give the Naboo yet another reason to remember him.

He bought a new pair of boots, and then spent the extra money to have them tailored to his feet. While the changes were made, he found clothes, a new belt, and half a dozen throwing knives. They were useless against armored troopers, but officers were another matter entirely.

After the fourth unwanted comment on his marriage tattoo, Obi-Wan gritted his teeth and bought a leather arm bracer that kept his skin covered from wrist to elbow. He didn’t want to explain it to curious passersby, and he certainly didn’t need anyone recognizing the words. He felt conspicuous enough with his lightsaber stuffed into his worn-out boot.

Negotiations with Karrde took six hours. It would have been seven, but the smuggler was somewhat mollified by the idea of being a bank, caretaker to two hundred million credits.

“At three percent interest rate, then,” Karrde said, once that part was finalized.

Obi-Wan gave him a look of polite disbelief. “I can go to an Imperial bank if I want that kind of fuckery, Karrde. Seven percent, monthly accrual.”

Karrde laughed. “Five percent, quarterly accrual, or you can try to figure out how to cart around two hundred million credits all on your own.”

“Deal,” Obi-Wan said. The negotiation netted him the necessary supplies for stage one and two of Lothal’s salvation, a ship just large enough to be freighter class but not really useful for hauling actual freight, some military surplus to continue his own personal crusade against Lothal’s Imperial military presence, and a list of contacts to start feeling out possibilities for stage three. The price he agreed to pay was fair enough that he wasn’t worried about bankrupting the Order before it became an Order again. Money hadn’t seemed to go anywhere in the Republic, but even with the Empire lacking its Emperor, inflation was only just beginning to rear its ugly head.

Karrde asked Chin to bring out a bottle once the contract was signed. “I remember that you like brandy.”

“Real brandy,” Obi-Wan insisted. “Or you can keep your swill to yourself.”

The Corellian smuggler grinned at him and poured two glasses. “Nothing but the best, I promise.” He raised his glass. “Well, Ben Tanno’baijii—here’s to good business.”

Obi-Wan allowed their glasses to clink together, just enough to hear a soft chime. “Here’s to neither of us dying in the immediate future.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

The next six months reminded him far too much of the Dyptherias outbreak on Tatooine. At that time, he’d had to acquire the vaccines from a newly appointed and uncooperative Imperial governor. Governor Feinn had thus held the record for shortest-term Imperial governor until Governor Cairug incited the citizens of Ord Mantell into seething rebellion in less than a week’s time. He considered the dead governor worth the loss of a knife.

Building the vaccine distribution net on Tatooine had eaten his reserves, which was probably how he’d managed to succumb to the illness in the first place—a partial immunization and a compromised immune system had almost been his downfall. It had also been too late for Owen and Beru, who were ravaged by Dyptherias to the point where he’d had a panicked day of wondering if he was going to wind up acting as a parent, after all. Luke received the vaccine and never saw a bit of the fever itself; he’d been sent to the Darklighter compound the moment Beru realized she was showing symptoms.

Lothal was easier, and yet so much harder. He heard too many tales from parents who’d lost young children to preventable diseases during the blockade. They were the first ones to back him when Obi-Wan insisted on vaccinating children first, then the immuno-compromised.

Most of Lothal was in agreement, but there were always a few holdouts. Some didn’t understand how to build herd immunity, or were sick already and thought that a vaccine would actually stop the disease. Others just didn’t give a damn but anyone other than themselves. Obi-Wan usually removed them bodily from whatever vaccination station had been set up for the day.

The five men who pretended to be immuno-compromised in order to get vaccinated out of turn, he almost threw off a cliff. All of Lothal was in peril just from Imperial presence. He wasn’t going to let a few idiots endanger innocent lives. There was enough for everyone, and they would wait their turn or discover if it were possible to learn to fly without wings.

Being disease-free and well-fed did a lot to restore local spirits. Obi-Wan had enough volunteers for a full-fledged army by the turn of the year. The twins were now twenty-five, and famous enough that he caught glimpses of them on grainy, pirated stills from the Holonet, imported via Karrde’s people to keep him abreast of current events.

Training men and women of various ages and species to be an actual military force to be reckoned with ate up all of his time. It kept him from dwelling on a silent Lifebond. It kept him from rushing off into space on a mad search for his brother.

It kept him from panicking about the fact that he had no idea how to get them home.

“We want to, there’s no doubt about that,” Hival said, frowning in concentration as he put his blaster back together. The Rodian was one of the few youths on Lothal who had weapons training, all of it via illegal sources.

“But some of us remember what Tarkin did to Lothal the last time we rebelled,” Tamassa added. She didn’t want to shoot anyone, and refused to carry, but she was one hell of a medic. Obi-Wan had a feeling they were going to need every damned healer, doctor, and nurse on their side, and Tamassa was doing her best to convince them to assist.

Obi-Wan nodded. “I understand. I won’t lie and say that this will be easy, but you do all have advantages this time that you didn’t before.”

“Yeah, like the understanding that things can’t actually get much worse than they just were,” Turkey grumbled, shoving a power pack into her rifle and removing it again, trying to get the motion familiar enough to become automatic. Obi-Wan desperately hoped that “Turkey” was a nickname, but it seemed impolite to ask.

“That would be one advantage, yes,” Obi-Wan said, and sat down on a table in front of his myriad charges. They’d claimed an entire warehouse about a month ago. The only members of the new Lothal rebellion who went home at the end of the day were parents who still had children to mind; everyone else bunked down here. The Imperials knew about the warehouse, according to comm chatter, but Obi-Wan had left them with a leadership vacuum a week previous, and no one knew quite what to do about the amassed Lothal. Some new commander would turn up soon, but in the meantime, it was breathing room that these people had desperately needed.

“You’re now fully aware of what you’re fighting for, and what you’re fighting to prevent.” Obi-Wan waited until he had everyone’s attention, and then went on. “The second advantage is that you are well-equipped, well-fed, and you’re on your way to being well-trained. That will make you capable of delivering the most damage while taking the least losses.” Guerrilla tactics would work well on Lothal, especially if they could regain access to each city’s sewer system. The government had sealed them off during the original rebellion, a brilliant plan that prevented anyone from performing maintenance, and now half of Capital City’s housing had no working drainage. The smell in the southern portion of the city was horrific, and starting to verge on toxic.

“Third advantage is?” Grey asked. She, Black and Silver had signed up almost before there was a rebellion to take part in.

Obi-Wan smiled. “As arrogant as it sounds? Me.”

“I’ve tallied you at one hundred and seventy buckets this year alone,” Hival said, holstering his blaster. “And considering that the Imps are still bleating about missing patrols, I’d say that tally is conservative.”

“You’re our good luck charm,” Grey said, her expression set and serious. “Our armed, dangerous, lunatic Jedi good luck charm.”

“The first rebellion started with lunatic Jedi, and I think it’s a good omen that it’s going to end with one.” Turkey grinned. “Fair’s fair.”

“All right, then.” Obi-Wan hopped down from the table, which jiggled alarmingly, literally on its last legs. “We’re going to keep things quiet for a week, lull them into a false sense of security…”

“And then we’re going to blow up the Eastwind Garrison,” Bret finished. He was a grizzled old man who’d lost his entire family to complications from the blockade. He was also a veteran of the Clone Wars who’d specialized in tactical demolitions. The kids adored him.

Obi-Wan left the planet only once before the Lothal Rebellion officially started. It gave the aged _Kazellis_ -class freighter her first flight under a new false name. He had three transponders, thanks to Ghent, but the false Imperial ident was the only one that concerned him at the moment.

The ship’s controls were sticky and would need work for better maneuverability, but her speed was good, and her hyperdrive hummed like she’d seen a recent refit. Given that the freighter was missing about one-third of her original size, the ship must have been a custom rebuild from what had to have been crippling damage.

The _Urbane Figment_ had only two quarter sets—a captain’s bolt-hole and another room that held three wall-mounted bunks—some of the most cramped ’freshers he’d ever seen, and a galley that could barely hold a droid, let alone a person, but it would suffice. It would only hold about half her original capacity of fifty metric tons of cargo, but he hadn’t planned on needing even that much.

The ship’s name was not lost on him, either. It made him wonder what Talon Karrde had surmised about his true identity—or thought he’d surmised.

Coruscant was still Imperial Center, a world not yet liberated by the Alliance’s snatch-and-grabs on Imperial territory. Obi-Wan went through the strict protocols for gaining entry to the planet, and wondered if Coruscant actually _wanted_ to be liberated. The Force was stressed, here, still showing the fading taint of Sidious’s long residence, but he wasn’t choking on the fear of multitudes.

The bribe from the docking master was almost a relief. It was something normal for him to focus on. Not the fact that the Coruscant he had last seen was still a Republic world, watched over by the Temple and by Valorum. Not the fact that the Coruscant he’d last seen _here_ had been a world being eaten by darkness.

The docking station he berthed in was far from the Senate District, and thus far from the renamed Palace District. Obi-Wan had to take a crowded airbus to get close enough to see either of them. He found a skywalk with several vendors hawking food and wares at the crowds passing back and forth. The third vendor had something both edible and portable, so he took his find, climbed up onto the rail, and sat like a tourist, eating his food while staring at the Imperial Palace.

The statues were all gone, of course, and the towers had been reshaped. The exterior public Grand Stair was blood red, a painted mimicry of a red carpet welcome.

The shining new veneers and structural changes did nothing to keep him from sensing what lay within. Twenty-five years later, and the Jedi Temple still reeked of death and Darkness.

 _Do they know?_ he wondered, considering the bustle and flow of pedestrian traffic all around him. _Do they know that he left the bodies of children to rot within for almost three years?_

“Come to see the Emperor’s old home for yourself, huh?” a local asked, slapping him hard on the back.

Obi-Wan flinched from the strength of the blow, angry at himself for losing so much of his focus to a damned building. He glanced up in order to answer, and forgot to say anything at all.

Dexter Jettster sat down on the railing beside him, which creaked alarmingly under his weight but didn’t give. The big Besalisk man had something captured from a vendor further away. His lunch was possibly still wiggling within its grain-wrapped bindings.

Fuck, but he hated when the Force created these sorts of coincidences.

“Cat got yer tongue, huh?” Dex didn’t seem to mind. “It’s a nice view. I come here a few times a week.”

“It…is a nice view,” Obi-Wan managed to say, neutralizing his accent as much as he could to Lothal’s Outer Rim standard. He never could get rid of his Coruscanti entirely unless he’d had time to prepare.

He should have been practicing, but _fuck_ , he had not expected to see anyone he knew on this planet. Coruscanti was still the order of the day on Imperial Center. He would fit right in if there wasn’t a nosy fucking Besalisk at his side!

“You know what the Palace used to be, right?” Dex asked. He wasn’t looking at Obi-Wan, whose only concession to a disguise had been to wash a black dye through his hair and brows.

“Some sort of a school, wasn’t it?” He kept the question light, curious, and uncertain. Dex was not acting as if he recognized his lunch companion, and the Force was refusing to give him hints. The only thing he knew was that he wasn’t currently in danger—aside from being a living Jedi sitting right in the middle of Imperial Center.

Dex chuckled. “Yeah, and what a school! Not a lot of folks here can even remember that much.”

“It seems like a strange thing to forget.” Obi-Wan was trying to ignore the chill crawling up his spine and settling in at the base of his neck.

Fucking Sith hells. The Sith Veil was still in place on this world.

Obi-Wan added its destruction to his list of things to accomplish. At this rate, he was going to sleep the entire way back to the Outer Rim.

“Always thought it was weird, myself,” Dex said, letting out a dainty burp before wiping his mouth with a napkin that looked to be composed almost entirely of grease. “But man, the people who came out of that school were something special.”

“Were they?”

“Course they were. They were also crazy,” Dex said in a low voice, as if confessing a terrible secret. “There was this one kid I knew who made most of the graduates look sedate. Had me smuggle him onto Imperial Center after it’d become a crime for any graduates of his school to be here.”

 _Dexter Jettster, that was not subtle at all,_ Obi-Wan thought, biting back a smile. “Sounds like an interesting person.”

“Oh, he was. I didn’t like it so much, hearing he’d died a few years back.” Dex snorted. “Probably from doing something crazy again.”

“Martyrdom does fit in the crazy category, yes?” Obi-Wan balled up the wrapper that had held his subpar sandwich.

“A lot of that school’s graduates went out that way,” Dex said. “Not surprised he did, too. I’m just still trying to figure out how he got himself un-martyred.”

Obi-Wan hopped down from the railing, boots landing with a soft thump against the duracrete. “Just consider him a ghost.”

“Ghost. Yeah, I suppose that’s true enough.” Dex lowered himself down from his perch, crossing two of his arms over his chest and leaving the other set to hang at his sides. “What do I call you, ghost?”

“Ben,” Obi-Wan said, and held out his hand. Dex uncrossed his arms to reach out and shake it, a wide smile on his face. “Ben Tanno’baijii.”

“That’s a very specific set of honorifics, Ben.” If anything Dex’s smile widened a full parsec. “Dexter Jettster. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“It’s a very specific sort of name,” Obi-Wan countered, “and the pleasure is mine.”

“What are you doing on Coruscant, Ben?”

Obi-Wan glanced around; the crowds on the walkway had thinned as the lunch rush finished. Everyone was making their way home, or going back to work. Whether it was Republic democracy or Imperial tyranny, some things never changed.

“I’m going to strip down and destroy a very large amount of underground real estate.”

Dex considered that with utter calm, as if he heard such plots every day. “You’re lacking in some explosives if you’re out to make that sort of mess.”

Obi-Wan smiled. “I don’t need explosives.”

“Well, then.” Dex looked around, his gaze taking in the crowds, the Senate Dome that no longer housed a working Senate, and the Imperial Palace. “I’m at loose ends right now. Most of my jobs dried up about five years after the first Empire Day. Would you like some company?”

Obi-Wan bit back an immediate refusal, a knee-jerk reaction created by his own fears. “I guess that depends on your ability to arm yourself. With blasters, of course,” he continued in a neutral voice.

“You little son of a bitch.” Dex grinned, shaking his head. “Course I can arm myself. You come along with me, and I’ll show you an armory that even the Imps would salivate over.”

Dex hadn’t been lying. His armory was a thing of beauty. He’d hidden it in the empty basement, just beneath the old diner. The building above was being rented out to some sort of insurance service.

“Where the hell did you get all of this shit?”

The Besalisk shrugged. He’d traded his street clothes for rougher, darker garments that would have been appropriate for spelunking—not a bad choice, all things considered.

“Here and there,” Dex said, pulling off a high-powered blaster rifle down from its wall mount. “Trading bits and bobs. I started building it during the Clone Wars, just in case Coruscant ever wound up in the thick of it. Turns out I was right, just not for the reason I always thought.”

“We should have known,” Obi-Wan said, snagging a rifle with a scope from the opposite wall. Just in case.

“You still believe that? After all these years?” Dex asked, giving him a frank look.

“Some days more than others.” Obi-Wan slung the rifle over his shoulder, and then noticed the long belt of what Dex was holding. “That is a lot of thermal detonators, Dex.”

“I know you said you wouldn’t need them, but hell, just in case.” Dex slung the belt over his shoulder like a bandolier. “I’ve got a speeder downstairs that we can use without getting Imperial attention, so long as you don’t do any fancy flying.”

“I can abstain,” Obi-Wan said, walking out of the armory. Dex came out, re-sealed the door, and then patted Obi-Wan on the shoulder.

“You’re awful damned solid for a ghost, friend.”

Obi-Wan smiled. “How do you know all ghosts aren’t this way?”

“I’ve seen a lot of ghosts over the years,” Dex replied in a serious, somber tone.

They were silent on the speeder ride over, ignored by the traffic passing overhead on the higher levels. Darkness worked in their favor; half of the Industrial Zone’s lighting was also shut down. From the intense quiet in the area, Obi-Wan suspected that most of the business had relocated offworld in the face of Imperial expansion.

Or perhaps there was a different reason for the quiet.

The stairs were easy to find, and there was still no hint of external cameras or other security. The chill from below was crawling up the stairs, searching fingers of mist that broke apart at surface level. Obi-Wan walked down without a word, knowing that Dex was only three steps behind him.

It was not much of a surprise to find that the entrance at the bottom of the stairs had been sealed over with a thick layer of duracrete. Obi-Wan regarded it thoughtfully, wondering if it was some new addition put in place after the Emperor’s death, or if Sidious had given his sanctuary another exit.

“My thermal detonators are gonna come in handy, after all,” Dex said, pleased.

“Maybe, but not yet. They would be too damned loud.” Obi-Wan placed his hands upon the wall, drew in a breath, and began to tear the duracrete apart on a molecular level. He quickly discovered that he preferred destabilizing metal; duracrete crumbled and filled the air with choking clouds of dust.

“Where the hell did you learn to do that?” Dex asked, letting out a quiet whistle.

“It was sort of a natural progression.” He could sense Dex still waiting for an explanation. “I learned how to do repairs on a molecular level. It just sort of evolved from there.”

The hole he’d created was spreading outward even as it ate its way forward. The duracrete had been placed to be a half-meter thick. By the end, he had to use the Force just to get the mess out of their way in order to gain entry.

“Now are you going to tell me what this place is?” Dex asked, after turning on a bright headlamp he’d brought to wear. The light bounced off of the glittering black stone walls, making Obi-Wan wince and glance away when it hurt his eyes.

“The Emperor used this place as his private residence before he claimed the Temple,” Obi-Wan said, bending down to pull his lightsaber hilt from the special pocket he’d sewn into his boot. “Or maybe calling it his private playground would be more accurate.”

Dex didn’t ask him how Obi-Wan knew. Dex was intelligent; he could put those pieces together on his own. Instead, he asked, “What are we stripping out of this place?”

Obi-Wan lit his lightsaber, casting sapphire blue light down the hallway. The softer light gentled the harsher glow from Dex’s headlamp. “The Emperor kept a lot of things in this place that should never have the chance to fall into the wrong hands—innocent or malevolent. If those things were left here, I’m taking them with me. If there is nothing…well, I’m still going to blow this place the fuck up.”

“And if we find people living here?” Dex asked. He had his rifle resting in the crook of one arm.

Obi-Wan remembered Rackthor’s death-glazed eyes, and the soul-dead gazes of the women he would later learn had been Rackthor’s sisters. “The chances of there being an innocent in this place are very, very slim.”

“Gotcha.”

If the place had been stripped, it had happened in a hurry. The blood-red banners still hung from the ceiling, but they looked tattered, affected by the dank, wet feel starting to pervade the dark rooms. Dex cursed the first time he stepped into a puddle, formed by a trickle of water running down one wall.

Obi-Wan made himself perform one single lap of the replicated throne room, where the Emperor’s second throne still sat at the highest point of the dais. The room was cold, and there remained nothing but memories. Sidious had not been here in a long time.

The door remained unmarked, but he knew it by sight. It had not existed when his Order had scoured the residence after Palpatine had been dethroned, so he had not been faced with the prospect of seeing it again.

 _Fuck it._ He and Dex had to pry the door open when the controls did nothing. Inside, the room was pristine—if starting to suffer from the same sort of environmental failure as everything else.

Obi-Wan swallowed. He’d expected it to be destroyed, or to see it put together in a different fashion, perhaps even empty, but this was heavily reminiscent of a room awaiting the return of its original occupant.

Dex’s hand came down on his shoulder, the heavy weight settling with gentle solicitousness. “Obi-Wan.”

It made him realize that he’d been doing nothing more than staring at the mirror on the far side of the room. He looked up to find Dex gazing at him without judgement, though there was pity in his eyes. Well, that was fine; Obi-Wan had been a pitiful mess when he’d first come here, and he’d left in even worse shape than that.

“What did he do to you?”

Obi-Wan shook off the horrid feeling of ice flooding into his limbs. He was a Jedi, and he could damned well stay warm in this pit with little effort. “Not a lot that I hadn’t already done to myself.” He turned and led the way out. “Come on. I’ll tell you all about my de-martyring while we see if the library is still intact.”

The story gave him something to focus on aside from how much this place still unnerved him. Dex, who had been suffering from the oppressive atmosphere almost as much, introduced some much needed loud laughter into the black stone halls.

“I told you that you were crazy,” Dex was saying, as Obi-Wan turned the corner into the library. Then he bumped right into Obi-Wan’s back, because Obi-Wan had refused to take another step.

Dex stopped trodding on Obi-Wan’s heels and looked around. The headlamp revealed rows of books, scrolls, data cards…and two pedestals that still held their worshipped contents.

“Huh. Guess he didn’t have time to clean house before he blew up,” Dex said.

“I guess not,” Obi-Wan replied, and had to swallow to moisten his dry mouth. “He had assistants, helpers—Hands, Adepts, even those blasted Inquisitors. It makes me very, very nervous that everything has been left alone.”

“Not a lot of folks know about this who weren’t here on Coruscant living it.” Dex took off his headlamp and sat it down in the doorway, face-up, so the light reflected down from the ceiling and illuminated most of the room. “There was a huge power shuffle the moment there was confirmed word of the Emperor’s death. If you didn’t get one of the top spots, it was safe to assume that you had a target on your back. A lot of the Emperor’s old cronies jumped ship in the first few days. The rest fled the moment they realized it was Ysanne Isard who’d come out on top, holding the Imperial reins.”

“Isard.” Obi-Wan’s brow furrowed as he placed the name. “She was head of Imperial Intelligence.”

“Even folks in the Empire call her Iceheart. Scary woman, and she revels in it.” Dex pulled a device from his pocket and tossed it out onto the floor, where it emitted a mist that filled bottom six inches of the room from wall to wall. “Thought so.”

“Laser triggers,” Obi-Wan said, and slung the rifle off of his shoulder. “I thought there was going to be a good use for his.” He pressed his eye to the scope, following each revealed line up to the ceiling. Ten precise shots took care of the defense grid.

“What do you think would have happened if we’d triggered it?”

“I’d prefer not to know,” Obi-Wan answered. “It’s not the only trap.”

Dex snorted. “Course not. What else?”

“Don’t touch anything. Every single bit of it is covered in Shillanis,” Obi-Wan said, running his fingertips along the closest bookshelf before rubbing the power between his fingers.

“What’s Shillanis?” Dex asked, giving him a wary look.

“Paralytic. Nasty one,” Obi-Wan said, and dusted his hand off on his trousers. “I learned how to deal with it a long time ago, but I advise against trying it out for yourself. It lasts for hours, and I don’t think you want me to drag you out of here. Stay there.”

Obi-Wan turned off Dex’s mist device and made a full circuit of the room, senses alert, but aside from the laser grid and the Shillanis, there was nothing further. It seemed too simple a trap, until he realized what the laser grid had been attached to.

“This was a quickly-laid trap. I’m guessing whoever set it always planned to come back,” Obi-Wan said. “If the lasers were triggered, there are two stone doors waiting to fall in place and block the entrance. The Shillanis would take care of everything else.”

“How?”

“It’s all over the floor,” Obi-Wan said, scuffing his boot and creating a faint white line on the stone. White dust particles were rising with every step, but they were heavy, and remained near the floor. “All the victim would have to do is touch something, fall down….and then they would never have been able to get up. They would have been breathing it in.”

“Always thought Palpatine was a piece of work,” Dex commented.

“He was,” Obi-Wan agreed.

“What did he want with you, Obi-Wan? How did you come into this place and get out again in one piece?”

“He wanted me to be his Apprentice,” Obi-Wan said, giving Dex a humorless smile.

“You said no, right?”

“Emphatically no. Fuck no. And also, fuck him.” Obi-Wan tapped his finger on the very tip of the holocron on its stand. “They took the holocrons.”

“There’s two left—”

“No, I mean…” Obi-Wan grimaced. “These two are the fakes that used to reside in the Temple Archives. The real Sith holocrons aren’t here.”

“Obi-Wan—shouldn’t we just destroy everything in this place, library included? We’d probably be doing the galaxy a favor,” Dex said.

“Once upon a time, I would have agreed with you.” Obi-Wan picked up the holocron, blew the Shillanis from its outer shell, and dropped it into his jacket pocket. “But part of the reason Palpatine succeeded so well in destroying the Jedi is because we didn’t know _anything_ about the Sith. We pretended they didn’t exist any longer, and the first time one showed up—”

“I’m sorry,” Dex said, when Obi-Wan clenched his jaw, unable to repeat the words. “I remember. But this stuff is dangerous, my friend.”

“It is. That’s why I need to figure out how to neuter it so that it’s useful. Jedi need to know what Sith can do, or the whole lot of miserable Dark Adept bastards that are still alive out there might try to start the entire fucking war all over again.”

Dex couldn’t touch anything, but he could hold open each unfolded plastine case as stacks of documents were carefully placed inside. Obi-Wan would have preferred to do exactly as Dex suggested, and burn it all…but without this, the only way to learn Sith history was to go to Korriban itself.

He didn’t want the galaxy’s surviving Jedi anywhere near Korriban.

The cloning tanks were still in place, but full of murky sludge that must have once been biological clones of the Emperor. Power had cut out, and each life within had drowned and rotted in place.

Obi-Wan swore under his breath when they passed by the Hssiss enclosure. The fucking cowards had let the beasts starve to death. The Hssiss hadn’t deserved such a fate; they couldn’t help being what they were.

“This place is a tomb, Obi-Wan,” Dex said. “Let’s blow it up now.”

“Agreed.”

He had originally planned to use the Force against key structural points. Dex’s detonators made it much easier, but he was still going to assist in the process.

To his surprise, Dex handed him the master control for the detonators when they had taken the speeder back to a safe distance. “You do the honors, Ben. I think maybe you’ve got a few bad memories to purge with this place.”

Obi-Wan ran his thumb over the switch. For a long moment, he gazed at the distant stairwell and remembered the time, long ago, when he had come to this place searching for a way to die.

Sidious’s underground sanctuary did not grant him a satisfactory fireball. However, the ground falling in as the massive complex collapsed in on itself was almost as enjoyable. The new crater made the stairs vanish, ate two nearby buildings, and made a third tower start to list dangerously to one side.

“Not bad,” Dex said, reclaiming his controller. “It’s lacking something, though.”

“What?” Obi-Wan asked, and then clapped his hands over his ears when there was a second, _deafening_ explosion. It blew the rubble-created lid off of the crater, and flames shot up halfway to the stars.

Obi-Wan shook his head, trying to dispel the ringing in his ears. Dex was chuckling. “Two-stage detonators. Haven’t gotten to use those since I quit mining.”

“Great bleeding fuck, Dex!”

“Well, you wanted to blow it the hell up,” Dex countered, resting two of his hands on his hips.

“I did, yes.” Obi-Wan watched the flames lower to a much more normal height, feeding on impurities in the rocks and combustible materials from the complex. “I will pay you for a case of those.”

“Where are you planning on taking a case of two-stage detonators?”

Obi-Wan smiled. “Lothal.”

The speeder came in handy when the Imperials poured forth en masse to find out why the Industrial Zone was collapsing. “Whoops,” Dex said, as Obi-Wan floored the accelerator while trying to keep his head down. Their pursuers were firing with precision, trying to vape them from the sky. “Guess I should have activated the second stage when we were a bit further away”

“It was worth it,” Obi-Wan said. “Is your injunction against fancy flying still in place?”

“Hell, no. Get us out of here!”

Anakin Skywalker had introduced him to the concept of dodging the massive electrical exchanges from power couplings atop the generator complexes. Obi-Wan was a hell of a lot better at timing it so that they did _not_ get fried on the way across the field.

The Imperials didn’t fare so well.

“I take it back. You’re never allowed to do that again,” Dex said, three of his hands over his chest. “That took six years off my life, Ben.”

“You’ve plenty of years remaining,” Obi-Wan countered, docking the speeder in an alcove and shutting down all power. They sat in the dark for only moments before the surviving Imperial speeders zoomed past, continuing their vain hunt.

Dex peered over the side to look at the late night traffic patterns passing back and forth far below them. “Should we get going?”

“In a moment.” Obi-Wan hesitated. “I’m glad you chose to be on that skyway today.”

“So am I,” Dex said, giving him a rough pat on the shoulder. “Hadn’t planned to, but then it got to be around lunchtime and I just had the itch to go. You would have been fine, though.”

“Maybe,” Obi-Wan said. He glanced down at his hands, which had remained steady the entire time he’d been inside Sidious’s damned hole. “But it was nice to have the company. It was good to have the reminder. Thank you.”

Dex just laughed as Obi-Wan powered the speeder back up. The slower patrols and their great searchlights would be along at any moment. “What are friends for?”

“Blowing things up, apparently.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you are an anti-vaxxer and this chapter hurt your feelings, I am not sorry. I am immuno-compromised and I LIKE BEING ALIVE.


End file.
